Top 5 Children’s Worst Jobs

Get set for a run down of some of the terrible tasks that children in Stirling, and around Scotland, were forced to do!

Warning: not for the faint-hearted...

5. Whipping Boy

Members of the royal family were much too special to be punished for anything they did wrong, so as Royal Whipping Boy it was your job to take their punishment when the prince or princess misbehaved.

Can you imagine that happening in school today?

4. Peat cutter

As a Peat Cutter you’d be working in a bog. No, not a toilet, a peat bog!

Peat is a mixture of rotten grass, plants and small animals. It looks a lot like mud and is really soggy and very squelchy.

Your job as a peat cutter would be to help cut the peat into squares, which you’d then pile up to dry. Once it had dried out, you would carry it into the house to be used on the fire.

3. Shepherd Boy

This might sound like quite a good job at first: shepherds spent their time lying on the hills in the sunshine watching sheep graze all around them, right? Wrong! You were more likely to spend your time sheltering from the rain, soaking wet and freezing cold!

But that’s not the worst of it. As a Shepherd Boy, it would also have been your job to ‘pop’ the sheep. As you might know, sheep like eating clover but it makes them very… well… gassy! Your job was to spot the swollen ones and ‘pop’ them in a certain place to let the gas out.

Smelly or what?!

2. Climbing boy

Sadly, this job didn’t mean you’d spend all day climbing trees! In fact, Climbing Boy or Girl was just another name for a chimney sweep.

From the age of 5 or 6 you’d climb up inside chimneys with a big brush and sweep all the soot out. It was dark, dirty and very dangerous - lots of climbing boys and girls got lost or fell and hurt themselves.

Here at the castle there’s a tale of one young climbing boy who climbed into the Palace chimneys and was never seen again…

1. Gong-scourer’s Boy

This is officially the worst job in the world!

A Gong-scourer was paid to clean out cess-pits. A cess-pit is a big hole in the ground where all the poo, pee and other disgusting stuff ended up. There weren’t any pipes to take it away back then!

As the Gong-scourer’s boy you’d be left with the jobs even your boss couldn’t stomach – like crawling into the smallest, dirtiest spaces of the cess-pit to clean them out!

The yucky mess had two layers: squidgy solid goo at the bottom, and a yellow-brown liquid on the top. You would get covered in both. Eugh! As nobody wanted to see (or smell!) you during the day, you would have to work during the night.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, rotting sewage gives off a gas called hydrogen sulphide (which smells like rotten eggs). If you didn’t get very ill or die from touching all the germs in the goo, chances were breathing in that gas might kill you.

‘Silent but deadly’ has a whole new meaning now!

Did You Know?

The oldest football in the world was found in the Palace at Stirling Castle.

There are three walnut trees in the castle.

The Palace took four years to build and was built on top of other buildings as there wasn’t enough space for it.

Stirling Castle was the first place in Scotland to have fireworks.

Mary Queen of Scots played football, tennis and golf.

There is a spell to protect the castle from witches carved into one of the doors in the Palace.

Mary Queen of Scots became queen when she was only 6 days old.

The oldest building in the castle today dates from 1381.

After the Battle of Bannockburn Robert the Bruce destroyed Stirling Castle to stop it falling into English hands.

The statues of the lions and unicorns on the top of the Great Hall weigh ¾ of a tonne each.

A man called John Damian tried to fly from the castle with homemade wings in 1507. It didn't work!

There are three wells in Stirling Castle and two still have water in them.

Football was banned by James I in 1429.

Most medieval battles were over in a few hours, some lasted only 20 minutes! The battle of Bannockburn in 1314 lasted for two days (but they didn’t fight all the time).

The castle has two holly trees. These trees are male and female and only the lower leaves are spiky to stop animals eating them - the leaves further up the tree are smooth.

Children working as servants in the castle were paid 2 loaves of bread and 8 pints of ale a day. They also received a wage of £1 a year which was paid on 22 November.

After the Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297 William Wallace used the skin of a dead English Lord to make himself a belt and a sword holder.

There is a hole in the wall of the Douglas Gardens that is reputed to have been made so a young Mary Queen of Scots could look at the view.

The black posts, called bollards, in the castle are actually small cannons stuck into the ground with their barrels blocked off.

When James V married Mary of Guise he wasn't even at the wedding! He sent someone else to stand in for him.

Castle Secrets

It is widely rumoured that James V would swap his riches for rags and sneak out of the castle to the old town of Stirling where he would mingle with his subjects posing as the guid man of Ballengeigh.

Castle Secrets

Secret binary code was discovered on one of the Stirling Heads that turned out to be musical notes to a long lost requiem from the 16th Century. Visitors can hear the music in the royal palace today.

Castle Secrets

The phrase “pushing the boat out” is thought to have been coined in relation to the extravagant celebrations held at the castle for Prince Henry’s baptism in 1594 when a full-size boat featuring live mermaids and shooting cannons was used to serve the fish course.

Castle Secrets

Nine skeletons dating from 1200-1400s were unearthed in a long-lost royal chapel in 2008. It is thought they must have been people of stature to have been buried within the castle. Visitors can come face to face with 2 of the skeletons in the castle exhibition.

Castle Secrets

Research carried out in 2011 revealed that King Arthur’s round table may well have been hidden beneath the historic King’s Knot that sits below the castle. Writers including John Barbour and Sir David Lindsay have linked the landmark to the legend of King Arthur for more than six centuries.